The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I decided to get a new domain name for my portfolio site, and tweak things a bit on it.

It took me way too long to come up with a domain name that wasn't taken, had a good ring to it, and actually meant something music-related.

http://metronomic.tk/

In your intro where you say "any object can become a musical instrument, including one's own environment. Even empty space has its own voice", the first thing I thought of was David Byrne's "playing the Building". He took an old organ in an old warehouse and wired it up to the pipes and beams with solenoids, air hoses and motors and made noise. More importantly, he made it open to the public to play with. Pretty cool, from an experimental view point. A waste of time to the narrow minded.

Also, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't completely destroyed that our collab wasn't part of your collab catalog. It's as if it were all in vain.

Oh, yeah, that reminds me, I need to set up and make a recording of an ambient art piece I made that uses an environment and the things in it to make an ever-evolving soundscape. :) It's basically a software implementation of a stereo tape loop where you have two speakers and two microphones, and each microphone feeds into the other speaker. It adjusts the audio via a gain model and generates a nice-looking circle plot as it goes. The room itself turns into a reverb, and the people in it affect what's being reverberated as well (both by their absorption spectra and by the sounds they make). There's also a very basic user interface that allows people to adjust the gain model.

It's intended for a public gallery with people milling about in it, but I've only tested it at home with me and my cats. (They don't like it.)

Wouldn't that eventually just become a continuous solid tone? Or maybe just to the human ear? A wall of sound, if you will.

It would, except that there's more sounds happening all the time that disrupt it. Especially in a gallery, with people wandering around and talking about things.

For the old-school version of this, check out Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room." It was done as a recording in 1969, not an installment, so there are no millers-about and passers-by, but the general concept is the same. It doesn't become one constant tone, but after about 8 hours, the human speech is completely unidentifiable and the ambient distortion pretty much sounds like static feedback and whalesong.

That was a direct inspiration to this project. :)

I misunderstood your original post, fluf. For some reason I thought it would be numerous multiplying words, sounds and delayed versions of each of those things. My mind imagined that eventually every space would be filled with layers of sound that is made up of talking, sounds, echos and endless delay to the point the delays become so close together that it's an endless string.

It would be if microphones and speakers were perfect and if the walls didn't reflect and so forth, but it's a purposefully lossy process instead. I like making art out of degradation.